WAG Exhibition Honours Winnipeg Artist Eva Stubbs

An exhibition highlighting the career of Winnipeg artist Eva Stubbs will have a free public opening at 7pm, Thursday, December 17. Eva Stubbs: The Rough Ideal will continue until March 20.

“Since my days as an undergraduate studying art history, I have admired Stubbs’ work, in particular her large-scale ceramic pieces, which can transform any gallery or public space,” says WAG Director Stephen Borys. “Her views on the value of community and the closeness of family, and her respect for humanity, are hallmarks of her career. Her sculptures and drawings turn on issues of identity, displacement, and historical memory.”

Born into a Jewish-Hungarian family in 1925, Eva Stubbs spent her formative years in Europe during the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the terrifying rise of anti-Semitism. These events stimulated her interest in the role that history and memory play in shaping human identity. Figurative and metaphorical, her work plumbs ideas that are both deeply personal and that reach beyond the particular into the well of shared human experience. Reflecting over 50 years of creative output, this exhibition consists of approximately 60 works, including sculpture in wood, bronze, and fired clay, as well as a selection of the artist’s charcoal and oil stick drawings. In addition to three key pieces from the WAG’s collection, the exhibition draws on over 30 public, corporate, and private collections.

“Through her sculpted and drawn figures and faces, and her gradual, generalized announcement of recognizable form, Eva Stubbs presents to us a kind of human ideal that encapsulates something of humanity's fragility,” says Andrew Kear, Associate Curator, Historical Canadian Art. “The sense of fragility that Eva’s work evokes is quite powerful. On one level, it symbolically registers moments of irredeemable brutality in human history. However, I think it also offers testament to human endurance and the capacity for people to flourish despite the odds.”